"Retirees Now Frequently Base Their Retirement Decisions on the Portfolio Success Rates Found in Research Such as the Trinity Study.... This Is Not the Information They Need for Making Their Withdrawal Rate Decisions."

"Big Moves Out of Stocks Should Not Be Done at All. But Strategic Asset Allocation Can Be Done At Very Rare Times, Maybe Six Times in an Investor’s Lifetime, Three Times When the Market Is Stupidly High and Three Times When Stupidly Low."

"There Is An Extensive Literature About the Predictability of Long-Term Stock Returns. There Is an Extensive Literature About Short-Term Market Timing. My Question Is About Long-Term Market Timing. The Literature Seems Slim."

"For Years, the Investment Industry Has Tried to Scare Clients Into Staying Fully Invested in the Stock Market at All Times, No Matter How High Stocks Go. It's Hooey. They're Leaving Out More Than Half the Story."

"There Are Time-Periods Where Stocks Are a Terrible Addition to That Portfolio. Yet Inexplicably, We As Planners STILL tend to Suggest That It Is 'Risky' to Not Own Stocks When in Reality the Only Risk Is to Our Business."

"There Is a Growing Behavioral Economics Movement, But It So Far Has Had Limited Impact. Economists Are Not Fond of the Softness and Imprecision of Psychology. These Notions Are Considered Vaguely Unprofessional and Flaky."

"I Was Hooked on the Idea of [Passive] Index Indexing, But Something Inside Made Me Wonder "Too Good to Be True?" and "What's the Downside?" I Happened on to Your Site and Valuation-Informed Indexing Seems to Make Sense."

"Rob's Da Man! Never in the History of the Diehards Forum Has One Poster, Always Making Civil and Well Thought-Out Posts, Managed to Irritate So Many Without Anyone Being Able to Articulate a Good Reason As to Why."

"Rob Bennett: Some People Disagree With Him, and He Rubs a Lot of People the Wrong Way. But He Has Interesting Ideas About Valuation-Informed Indexing, and He Delves Into a Lot of What Makes a Successful Investing Strategy."

"The Return Predictor Is Based upon the Principle that Over the Long Term, Stock Market Prices Will Reflect the Ten-Years Earnings Growth of the Underlying Companies. Prices Return to a Common Growth Pattern."

"You Go About It in a Manner that is Catastrophically Unproductive by Adding Missionary Zeal that Inflates Your Importance and Demeans Others. The Whole Idea That There is a New School of Safe Withdrawal Rates Reeks of Personal Aggrandizement."

“What Warren Buffett Did Was Essentially Quite Close to What Rob Bennett Has Written. Buffett Has in Fact Been Cleverly Incorporating Long-Term Market Timing Based on Valuation of the Market in His Allocation of Money to Stocks.”

"You've Got to Say One Thing for Rob. He Has NEVER Lowered Himself to Ad Hominen Attacks -- Subliminal or Otherwise -- on Any Other Person on This Board. Not Once. Ever. At Least Give Him Credit for That."

"Mr. Bennett, You Are Spot on About Integrating Some Type of Valuation Filter to One's Stock Allocation. Astute Investors Have Incorporated Some Type of 'Valuation Timing' Into Their Investment Decisions Since the Beginning of Time."

"There Is Nothing More Doubtful of Success Than a New System. The Initiator Has the Enmity of All Who Profit By Preservation of the Old Institution and Merely Lukewarm Defenders in Those Who Gain By the New One."

"Difficult Subjects Can Be Explained to the Most Slow-Witted Man If He Has Not Formed Any Idea of Them. But the Simplest Thing Cannot Be Made Clear to the Most Intelligent Man If He Believes He Knows Already What Is Laid Before Him."

"I Certainly Have Seen the Academic Profession Squelching Unfashionable ideas and Have Often Been on the Wrong Side of It. Kuhn Shows How Most Pathbreaking Scientific Ideas Are Rejected at First, Usually for Decades.”

"Rob Bennett Was an Early Pioneer in 3rd Generation Modeling by Advocating (Through Various Online Forums) that Withdrawal Rates Must Be Adjusted for Market Valuations Consistent with Research by Campbell and Shiller."

"Rob Is an Enigma in the Personal Finance World. He Has Interesting Theories on Investing Based on Market Valuations. But He Weaves a Tale Which Makes the Stories of Alexander Litvinenko & Gareth Williams Seem Tame by Comparison."

"I Have Read Everything I Can About Valuation-Informed Indexing. Buy-and-Hold Is Extremely Problematic. I Respect the Passion, Hard Work and Research That You Have Put Into This Very Important Issue. Your Work Has Huge Value."

"The Amount of Return You Can Expect From a Diversified Equity Portfolio Is Inversely Correlated to the Market Valuation at the Start of the Holding Period. It Is One of the Most Robust Statistical Relationships in Modern Finance."

"I've Had Similar Experiences. I Know of Two Young Professors Who Wanted to Do Research on Fundamental Index and Reported to Me That Their Colleagues Advised Them That This Line of Research Could Derail Their Career Prospects."

"As with Drug Studies Funded by Drug Companies, It Would Be Churlish to Suppose that the Chicago School of Business Was in the Bag. But It Would Also Be Idealistic to Assume That There Was No Funding Bias at All."

"This Sort of Intimidation Is Not Acceptable. The Cigarette and Pharmaceutical Industries Found Research Supporting Their Products By Funding It. But That Was Big Money Supporting Outcomes, Not Dissuading Others."

"The Situation [Referring to the Intimidation Tactics Used to Silence Academic Researcher Wade Pfau's Reporting of the Dangers of Buy-and-Hold Investing Strategies] Seems Well Below Any Professional and Academic Acceptable Standards."

"It Is Obvious that Rob, in Attempting to Identify New Safe Withdrawal Rate Strategies...Is Goring Your Ox. If Rob Improves on [the] Safe Withdrawal Rate Methodology, the Implication Is Clear: You Are All, Metaphorically, Out of Business."

"Naturally, I Am Finding That Valuation-Informed Indexing Can Allow You to Reach a Wealth Target With a Lower Saving Rate and to Use a Higher Withdrawal Rate in Retirement Than You Could With a Fixed Allocation."

"A Careful Examination of Past Returns Can Establish Some Probabilities About the Prospective Parameters of Return, Offering Intelligent Investors a Basis for Rational Expectations About Future Returns."

"How Can It Be That One-Year Returns Are So Apparantly Random and Yet Ten-Year Returns Are Mostly Forecastable? In Looking at One-Year Returns, One Sees a Lot of Noise. But Over Longer Time Intervals the Noise Effectively Averages Out and Is Less Important."

"The Notion That Rich Valuations Will Not Be Followed By Sub-Par Long-Term Returns Is a Speculative Idea That Runs Counter to All Historical Evidence. It Is an Iron Law of Finance That Valuations Drive Long-Term Returns."

"It's January and the Temperature Is Below Freezing. If You Asked Me Whether It Will be Warmer or Cooler Next Tuesday, I Would Be Unable to Say. However, If You Asked Me What Temperature to Expect on April 9, I Could Predict "Warmer Than Today" and Almost Surely Be Right."

"If the Response Is "Who Knew?", It Won't Be Much Comfort for Retirees in the Employment Line at Wal-Mart. This is Especially True Since a Rational Understanding of History and the Drivers of Longer-Term Stock Returns Can Help Retirees To Avoid That Surprise."

"New of the Demise of the Random Walk Has Only Very Slowly Spread, In Part Because Its Overthrow Came as a Shock. If the Random Walk Hypothesis Were Correct, the Most Likely Return Would Be the Historic Average Return. The Evidence, However, Is Strongly Against This."

"I Don't Care If You Do or Don't Believe That the Market Will Behave Similarly in the Future As It Has in the Past. Either Way, This [The Stock-Return Predictor] Is an Excellent Way to Understand What the Market Has Done In the Past."

"It Really Is a Shame and Indefensible That So Many Feel the Need to Jump Into It With No Interest of Posting on the Topic But Just to Disrupt. Are You That Insecure? Some on the Forum Have an Interest in This Topic. If You Don't, Stay Out!"

"Irrational Behavior Does Follow Patterns. But How Many Experts in Behavioral Finance Believe That Such Knowledge Can Be Used to Predict Markets? Basically, None. Your Model Cannot Attain the Level of Predictive Value You Claim."

"The Safe Withdrawal Rate Studies Are Based on History. This [The Retirement Risk Evaluator] Shows, Based on the Same History, What the Probabilities Are for the Future at Various Starting Points. If the First Has Value, Then Surely This Does Too."

"There Are Hundreds of People Who Contributed to This. This Calculator [The Stock-Return Predictor] Demonstrates in a Compelling Way the Power of This New Internet Discussion-Board Communications Medium."

"A P/E10 of'26' Is Bad. Now Look at the 30-Year Return Predicted by the Calculator -- 5.4 Percent Real. That's Not Bad. There Are All Sorts of Strategic Implications That Follow From Understanding That Stocks Provide Different Sorts of Returns Over Different Sorts of Time-Periods."

"I Would Never Invest in Anything Without Having Any Idea What the Expected Return Is. For Instance, I Would Not Walk Into a Bank And Say "I'll Take One Certificate of Deposit, Please" WIthout Asking What Rate They Are Offering."

"I've Seen Things Said on Investing Boards That I Have Never Heard Said in Discussions of Any Non-Investing Topic. The Question of Whether Valuations Affect Long-Term Returns Is a Topic That Causes People More Emotional Angst Than Does Abortion or Impeachment Proceedings or the War in Iraq."

"It's Not Possible For Those Who Have Come to Believe That Stocks Are Always Best to Accept that Valuations Matter. The Two Beliefs Are Mutually Exclusive. If Valuations Matter, There Is Obviously Some Valuation Level At Which Stocks Are Not Best. The Two Paradigms Cannot Be Reconciled."

"Dear Rob -- I Just Became Aware of Your Past Research in September. Since Then, I've Read Archives From Many Discussion Boards and Websites, and I Always Find Your Writing to Be Very Interesting and Intriguing."

"I Think Rob Bennett Did Provide An Important Contribution in Terms of Describing a Way for P/E10 to Guide Asset Allocation for Long-Term Conservative Investors. I Also Think He Was Right on the Issue of Safe Withdrawal Rates."

"Because the Precise Timing of This Mean Reversion Is Not Known in Advance, Expecting the Result to Happen in the Short-Term Will Not Be Possible. But Long-Term Investors Who Can Be Patient Can Wait for This Mean Reversion and Will Eventually Come Out Ahead."

"Your Work Is at Odds with the Ethos of the Board -- Here the Theme is John Bogle's Philosophy, Which Eschews Market Timing. This Board Came Into Existence to ESCAPE One Individual, the Very Individual With Whom You Have Openly Aligned Yourself."

"Why Is It Such an Odious Violation of the Tenets of Bogleheadism to Explore Whether Someone Who Has Enough Patience Might Be Able to Benefit from the Transitory Nature of Speculative Returns (the Idea That the P/E Ratio Eventually Ends Up Where It Started)?"

"Let Me Explain Why I Posted About This Here. Valuation-Informed Indexing Has Had Critics for Years. But Until Norbert Did It In 2008, Nobody Seemed to Have Provided a Serious Investigation of It. I Couldn't Understand Why. That Bothered Me."

"If You Really Don't Like Market Timing in Any and All Forms, You May Not See Any Point in an Empirical Investigation. You View Me as One of a Long Line of Hucksters Trying to Sell You Some Snake Oil. I Don't Want to Be Such a Person."

"Having a Completely Ineleastic Demand for Equities Is a Bit Bonkers. No One Acts That Way with Life's Other Important Commodities. Campbell Advocates a Linear Valuations-Based Strategy so That You Wouldn't Be Making Big Changes. This Would Be Like Rebalancing But More Flexible."

"The Whole Idea of Valuation-Informed Indexing Belongs to You. Do You Mind if I call the Paper 'Valuation-Informed Indexing'? I Would Give You Credit. I Have Been Toying With the Idea of Sending the Paper to the Journal of Finance, Which Is the Most Prestigious Journal in Academic Finance."

"I Definitely Need to Cite You as the Founder of Valuation-Informed Indexing, As I Have Not Found Anyone Else Who Can Lay Claim to That. Shiller Pointed Out the Predictive Power of P/E10 But Never Discussed How to Incorporate It Into Asset Allocation, As Far As I Know."

"I Tested a Wide Variety of Assumptions About Asset Allocation, Valuation-Based Decision Rules, Whether the Period Is 10, 20, 30 or 40 Years, and Lump-Sum vs. Dollar-Cost Averaging To Show That the Results Are Quite Robust to Changes In Any of These Assumptions."

"I Wrote Up the Programs to Test Your Valuation-Informed Indexing Strategies Against Buy-and-Hold and I Am Quite Excited. You Say in the RobCast That VII Should Beat Buy-and-Hold About 90 Percent of the Time. I Am Getting Results That Support This."

"Never Underestimate the Power of a Dominant Academic Idea to Choke Off Competing Ideas, and Never Underestimate the Unwillingness of Academics to Change Their Views in the Face of Evidence. They Have Decades of Their Research and Academic Standing to Defend."

"Since They Did Not Diagnose the Disease, There Is Little Popular Confidence That They Know the Cure. What If Economics Is, Actually, At the Same Level as Medicine Was When Doctors Still Believed in the Application of Leeches?"

"I Love the Humans Dearly (the Title of the Book I Am Writing Is Investing for Humans: How to Get What Works on Paper to Work in Real Life) But They Can Be a Trial at Times. Hey! Helping the Humans Learn What It Takes to Invest Effectively Is Not All That Different From Being Married!

"Wow, I Did Not Realize You Had Achieved This Much Success and Had Many Devoted Believers/Followers. That’s Great, Then Ignore the Opposition. It Is Great to Have Opposition: That Means You Are Doing Something Right."

"I Do NOT Believe I Know It All. I Believe That Shiller Discovered Something Very Important and It Appalls Me That More People Are Not Exploring the Implications of His Findings. My Aim Is To Launch a National Debate."

"I LOVE Everything About Buy-and-Hold Other Than the Failure to Encourage Investors to Take Price Into Consideration When Setting Their Stock Allocations. That's a Mistake That Was Made Because Shiller’s Research Was Not Available at the Time The Strategy Was Being Developed."

"Valuation-Informed Indexing Sounds Like a Real Thing. If It Is and I Can Thoroughly Understand It, Then It Will End Up In My Classrooms and in My Students' Minds (Of Course, With References to You and Wade)."

"As a Fan of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I Know That Progress Can Be Frustratingly Slow and What Is Typically Needed Is Either a Crisis or the Ascent of a New Generation of Scientists Who Did Not Build Their Careers on the Old Models and Theories."

"Rob Gets Himself So Worked Up Over What Someone Else Is Doing With Their Own Money and Not Bothering Rob in the Least. As Long As They Aren't Knocking on Your Basement Door, What Do You Care? They Are Happy and Content. Leave Well Enough Alone and Focus on Your Own Account."

"I've Been on Forum Since the BBS Days and I Think Rob is Special. He Could Be an Internet Meme If He Put Some Effort Into It. Someday, He Will Realize That the Only Thing He's Good At Is Being an Epic Loser. He Just Needs to Embrace That Idea and Run With It. Watch Out, LOLCats, Here Comes Pathetic Guy!"

"You Guys [the Greaney Goons] Are the Same Jokers Who Have Done This Before, Sparring with Rob Over Nonsensical Issues On This Site and Others, Leveling Personal Attacks, and You Don't Even Use Real Names! Rob Is Entitled to His Opinion, But the Fact That You Challenge Every Jot and Tittle of What He Says Makes It Clear You Have An Unholy Agenda. Please Take It Elsehwere."

"Rob, Take This As Friendly Advice. You're a Smart and Articulate Guy and You Could Be Making Valuable Contributions to This Discussion. I've Dealt with the Mentally Ill Before and I've Found That They Sometimes Can Be Reasonable If Gently Redirected."

"I’m a Numbers Guy. And I Believe I Understand Rob’s Thesis, that Future Returns, Over the Next Decade, Have a Tight Inverse Correlation to the PE10 for the Starting Point. Remember, Correlation Doesn’t Need to be 100%, Only That There’s a Bell Curve of Potential Outcomes that Shift Meaningfully Based on the Input."

"I Have had Academic Researchers Tell Me That They Dream of the Day When They Will be Able to do Honest Research Once Again. I Have had Investment Advisors Tell me That They Dream of the Day When They Will be Able to Give Honest Investing Advice Again."

"Let’s Call a Spade a Spade, Shall We? Wade Pfau Stole Your Research and Put His Name on it, Throwing You Just a Tiny Crumb of Acknowledgement to Ward Off a Lawsuit. He’s Profiting Handsomely By His Theft, Leading a Charmed Life, Widely Published, Widely Respected. While Rob Bennett Continues to Toil in Total Obscurity. It’s So Incredibly Unfair, I Think If It Happened to Me, It Could Actually Drive Me Insane."

“The Buy-and-Holders Feel Burned. They Want to Use the Fact That They Root Their Strategies in Peer-Reviewed Research to Shut Everybody Else Down. But, Since They Made a Mistake About What the Research Says, They Ended Up Shutting Themselves Down. This Is What Makes Them Angry.”

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:

“We need to punish…”

THERE’S your problem, right there, slick.

I don’t say that you are entirely wrong about this particular point, Anonymous.

The Buy-and-Holders see it as “unfair” that I talk about the 32 years of peer-reviewed academic research that shows how dangerous their “strategy” is. It’s not really me that is punishing them. It is the academic research that is punishing them. I am just the mild-mannered reporter that points to what the academic research says.

The Buy-and-Holders were pioneers. They were the first ones that said that investing strategies should be rooted in peer-reviewed academic research. I love them for that. It annoyed me when I read stuff about investing from four different “experts” and heard four different ideas about how to proceed. If the experts don’t agree on even the basics, they are not true experts. If they can’t agree on the basics, there is no legitimate body of knowledge to which they are making reference. If there is no legitimate body of knowledge to which the experts in a field make reference, knowledge in the field is not sufficiently developed for us to say that it is possible to come to possess a true expertise in that field.

The Buy-and-Holders feel burned. They want to use the fact that they root their strategies in peer-reviewed research to shut everybody else down. But, since they made a mistake about what the research says, they have ended up shutting themselves down. This is what makes them angry. This is what makes them feel punished. This is what makes them hate me.

I am 100 percent in tune with the ORIGINAL Buy-and-Hold mission. I believe in following what the research says. The nature of research-based strategies is that they must change when the things taught by the research change. All of us who believe in research-based strategies are essentially slaves to the research-based findings. We cannot just reject those findings because we don’t like them. We must obey the lessons of the research or stop putting ourselves forward as advocates of research-based strategies.

It is not my intent to punish the Buy-and-Holders. It is my intent to honor the research. But, yes, the Buy-and-Holders feel it as a punishment because they do not want to be bound by the findings of the past 32 years and I just refuse to stop making reference to them.

I like the Buy-and-Holders. I see my work as an extension of their work, a reform of their work, an improvement on their work, a correction of their work. I respect the work they did and I honor them in all my writings and I like them as people and I am grateful for their many powerful insights. There would be no Valuation-Informed Indexing today if we had not had Buy-and-Hold yesterday.

But I think that my Buy-and-Hold friends are making a terrible mistake by being unwilling to correct their mistakes. They are destroying the lives of millions of middle-class people and I do not believe that that was at all their intent when they started out. So I feel bound to point out those mistakes and to do all in my power to bring them around.

I like the Buy-and-Holders. It is BECAUSE I like them that I “punish” them by talking about what the research really says. In the long term, they won’t see it as a punishment to learn how stock investing really works. But in the short term they do indeed see it that way because of a false pride.

The Buy-and-Holders should take pride in their genuine achievements while correcting the things they got wrong. By causing financial devastation to millions, they are running the risk that in days to come many will not even give them credit for the many powerful insights they really did develop and offer to us all.

I see myself as the greatest friend the Buy-and-Holders have in this world. But you are correct that there are a good number of Buy-and-Holders who view any reference to the last 32 years of peer-reviewed academic research in this field as a terrible punishment.

I send 50 e-mails re the Wade Pfau matter every day. I put up a new blog entry here every day. I post a new column at the Value Walk site every week. I am working on six long articles (101 Powerful Investing Insights that We Developed During the First 12 Years of Our Discussions of the Realities of Stock Investing, etc.) that will help people gain in a short amount of time an understanding of why we are in an economic crisis today and why we are the luckiest generation of investors ever to walk Planet Earth. I expect to give a new presentation to the Financial Bloggers Conference this year and to meet my old friends there and to make new ones. After I have completed the six long articles, I will probably write some Guest Blog Entries at political and economic sites. When your trial comes, I will testify honestly. When people like my good friends Jack Bogle and Bill Bernstein and Larry Swedroe express a willingness to work with Valuation-Informed Indexers to bring this economic crisis to an end and to teach millions of middle-class investors what they need to do to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent, I will work with those people to spread the word.

Does all that make good sense to you?

I don’t agree that you are “doing just fine.” I think you are doing horribly. You are in great emotional pain. This comes through in every post you have put forward for 12 years now. You are on your way to a long prison sentence. You heart is filled with hate and anger and envy. You are on a very bad path, Anonymous. That’s my sincere take.

You need people who do not agree with your investing views to try to help you see the other side of the story. You have hurt yourself by excluding those people from your life (and you have of course hurt millions of others by excluding those people from the lives of millions of others). You hurt. And you destroy. And you deny yourself access to the people who could help you because you are too filled with false pride to even listen to the mountain of evidence that you have made a terrible mistake that has robbed you of a great amount of wealth and that is robbing millions of others of a great amount of wealth.

If stocks continue to perform in the future anything at all as they always have performed in the past, we will have another stock crash, one big enough to put us in the Second Great Depression. If that melts Jack Bogle’s heart, we will enter the greatest period of economic growth in our history and the entire nation will pull together to bury Buy-and-Hold 30 feet in the ground, where it can do no further harm to humans and other living things. I will testify honestly at your trial. But I will also testify charitably. I think that the words that I will put forward will help a bit. We’ll see.

You’re not giving an inch and I am not giving an inch, Anonymous. So we are just going to have to wait and see whether that next price crash melts Jack Bogle’s heart or not. I am not God. I could be wrong. But I believe what I am saying. I believe that Jack has good in him and I believe that the onset of the Second Great Depression is going to melt the man’s heart. We’re just going to have to have the patience to wait and see how it plays out.

I wish you all good things, my boastful-on-the-outsude and hurting-on-the-inside friend.

You are wrong on so many counts here Rob. By the way, I haven’t been here for 12 years as you allege. You talk of hurt, pain, fear and anger. Those are just your feelings coming through.

The bottom line is we are talking about investing so that we can meet the needs of our families and provide for oursleves in retirement. There is a scorecard to determine the winners and the losers. The scorecard looks at net worth, the income we can derive from our investments and the total return of those investments. This scorecard cuts through all the canned lines, lies, distractions, etc. the numbers tell the story. When you entered your proclaimed retirement, you shared your numbers with the community. Beyond telling us how you moved out of stock, you have avoided further updates beyond telling us what you placed your money into. By those categories, we can deduce that you have fallen behind those you describe as buy and hold. Perhaps this is what has made you so bitter. In short, your scorecard does not look that great compared to those you bash. You know what? That is not our fault. We are all responsible for ourselves. Instead of trying to give advice, you should have been spending your time taking advice.

Rob, look again at to what you claim as successes (which we can argue as to the value). Notice that you have nothing there tied to the scorecard. Results matter and that is why we invest.

We are all grown adults. We can make our own decisions and we are doing just fine without you.

You left out an important word, Anonymous. The accurate way to say it is “We are all grown adult humans.

Leave out the “humans” part and you leave out the part about why you cannot make your own decisions effectively without having some means to hear the other guy’s point of view. Without access to that other point of view, you are making those decisions not effectively but horribly ineffectively.

You fancy yourself the first human being incapable of making a mistake. You thereby play the role of the prideful fool. If the stock market continues to perform in the future anything at all as it has always performed in the past, it will dish out great pain to the prideful fools among us, a pain so great that no decent person would wish it on the most abusive Goon poster ever to visit the internet.

My best and warmest wishes to you, my Proud-Goon-on-the-Outside but Frightened-Human-on-the-Inside Friend.

Rob, look again at to what you claim as successes (which we can argue as to the value). Notice that you have nothing there tied to the scorecard. Results matter and that is why we invest.

If you don’t adjust your portfolio value for the effect of over-valuation, you are looking at a Fantasy Scorecard, Anonymous. Call me madcap for not being impressed by the big numbers that appear on a fantasy scorecard.

After the crash, there will be millions of middle-class people in the market for honest investing advice. I have 12 years of material at this site exploring in great depth the first true research-based strategy. And I have 12 years of warnings about the dangers of Buy-and-Hold, which gives me a credibility that no one else in this field possesses today.

That translates into billions of dollars in my pocket. That translates into me becoming one of the richest people in the United States. There are rewards that come from posting honestly on the subject of stock investing, Anonymous. That’s as it should be. People need to have their portfolios grow if they are to live rich (in every sense of the word) lives. We need to have honest people working in this field and the only way to get them is to encourage honesty by enriching those who practice it.

The billions of dollars that I will receive following the next crash are real. The thousands you count as yours because of your belief that Fantasy Portfolio numbers are meaningful are not real. So I am miles and miles and miles ahead of you.

Could I be wrong? I am one of the flawed humans. Of course I could be wrong.

Am I going to agree to post dishonestly on the numbers my friends use to plan their retirements because there is at least a theoretical possibility that I am wrong? I am not. I haven’t been willing to do that for 12 years now and I won’t be willing to do it for the next 12 billion years. After that amount of time, I acknowledge that I might need to reconsider. We have to be practical about these things, no?

We will find out which scorecard provides more accurate feedback following the next price crash, Anonymous. There is no other way to resolve things at this point.

I naturally wish you the best of luck with whatever investing strategies you elect to pursue.

Fantasy? What is more of a fantasy, my interest and dividend payments of over $100k a year? You count your interest, right? My home value of over $700k? You count your home, right? My cash in the bank? My bonds? My CD’s? Can’t compare stock because you don’t have any.

The people who invested in the Bernie Madoff fund thought they were smarter than the 140 years of historical returns too, Anonymous.

I believe that it is the 140 years of historical returns that tell the real story, not the marketing slogans of the Wall Street Con Men.

You are right that e-mails about Wade don’t pay the utility bills and that presentations at blogger conventions don’t pay the grocery bills. I get it.

What e-mails about Wade and presentations at blogger conventions do is to save my country, a country that I love.

Would you tell a fellow on the front lines to run away from enemy fire because taking a bullet for your country doesn’t pay the utility bill, Anonymous? I would not. We all live better lives because there are men and women willing to take a bullet for the rest of us.

I have been asked to take a bullet for the rest of us. Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick has brought our economic system to its knees four times in U.S. history. The economy is bigger today and so the effects are worse today. We are in the early days of this economic crisis and we have already seen people both on the left (The Occupy Wall Street Movement) and the right (The Tea Party Movement) begin to lose confidence in our political system. We are as a nation today at war with the Wall Street Con Men and someone has to work up the courage to take a bullet or we all go down together.

I had a conversation with my mother shortly before she died in which she told me that maybe all the amazing insights that I write about at this site will only be discovered after I am dead. The words she said had the ring of truth to me for some reason. I hate that idea. I very, very, very much don’t want it to work out that way.

But if it does, it does, you know?

I love my country. If it comes to me taking a bullet for my country, I will have to take a bullet for my country. I want the chalice to pass my lips. I never dreamed of all the wonderful pleasures that come from taking a bullet for my country. But maybe that’s the story here. If so, then I have to accept it, whether I like the idea or not.

I don’t have it in me to post dishonestly on the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements, Anonymous. You cannot teach a dog to meow and you cannot teach a cat to bark and you cannot teach Rob Bennett to post dishonestly on safe withdrawal rates. It’s not in me. So please try to let that one go.

I am an optimist about our system of government. So I believe it is going to end with me receiving a $500 million settlement. After 12 years of this, I don’t feel that I can 100 percent rule out the other possibility. But what I believe is the more likely scenario is that we are all going to see the biggest economic surge in the history of our nation. I believe that http://www.PassionSaving.com will be the biggest financial site on the internet in not too many more years. I believe that I will be running the Bogleheads Forum as a sub-domain and that I will be giving lectures all over the country with my good friend Jack Bogle in which we will explain why Get Rich Quick strategies never work in the long run and why we all need to work together to see that Buy-and-Hold never, ever, ever raises its ugly monster head again.

But the bottom line here is that neither of us can tell the future and we are just going to have to wait to see how things play out. I see no other realistic options at this point. Do you?

Co-authoring the most important peer-reviewed research paper published in this field in three decades, research that shows millions of middle-class people how to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent, was a catastrophically unproductive act.

“The Buy-and-Holders see it as “unfair” that I talk about the 32 years of peer-reviewed academic research that shows how dangerous their “strategy” is.”

No, Rob.

But everyone does see it as unfair when you create ridiculous lies like the one above.

It appears YOU are the only one who [purposefully?] fails to see the distinction between rejecting your devious and dishonest methods, versus any ideas you have that may or may not have independent merit.

One thing is sure: Your actual lies have been preventing any (theoretical) value in your ideas from ever possibly getting through.

You act EXACTLY like a mother exhibiting Munchhausen’s by proxy: artfully and callously crafting the careful outward appearance of doting and concerned care; while in actuality and fact, just feeding an intense personal ego need, via horrific and unconscionable methods.

Set forth below is the text of a thread-starter that I posted to the Goon Central board:
Yip made a comment about having a "diversified" portfolio. That certainly sounds like a good idea. Diversification reduces risk.The trouble is that there is a huge incentives for those in The Stock-Selling Industry to offer non-diversified advice. If commissions were the same for IBonds and TIPS as they are for stocks, the "experts" in this field would tell us to buy stocks only when they are…

There's a fellow ("Allan") at the Vanguard Diehards board who describes my interest in knowing whether the stocks that I buy will be able to provide an acceptable long-term value as an "obsession."
Is he right?
In a way, I guess.
There's no question but that I wouldn't think of putting money down on stocks without first taking into consideration the price at which they are being offered. My desire to know the price I pay for stocks, and whether the stocks will be able to provide an…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to a blog entry at this site:
Was Cooly (and the other Trinity contributors) ‘addicted’ to buy-n-hold when they undertook their original research? Really?
Thank you for asking an intelligent question, Banned.
At the time Cooley did his SWR study, Shiller’s revolutionary finding that valuations affect long-term returns had already been public knowledge for a good number of years. So, yes, the fact that Cooley did not…

Set forth below are some words that I posted as a comment in the discussion thread for my recent Guest Blog Entry titled Stock Investing Without All the Drama.
Thanks for your kind comment, RetireByForty.
Yes, this is ideal for retirees. People are often impressed that VII can provide a portfolio of double the size of a Buy-and-Hold portfolio at the end of 30 years. But the real magic here is that it does this at dramatically less risk. This is a win/win/win — greater returns and less…

Set forth below are the words of a comment that I recently put to the Goon Central board:
I now remember why he pissed everyone off.
I piss lots of people off, Cut-Throat. It's an established fact.
What do you want in an investment advisor? Do you want someone who whispers pretty lies in your ear? Or do you want someone who tells you the way it really is and helps you to retire many years sooner as a result?
You won't have a hard time finding someone who will be only too happy…

Business Day recently published an article reporting on the investment insights developed in the Retire Early and Indexing discussion-board communities during the first seven years of The Great Safe Withdrawal Rate Debate. The article is entitled Why a Common-Sense Approach to Investing Became Unpopular.
Juicy Excerpt: Investing claims backed by objective evidence are better than those from a bunch of guys shooting the breeze. Unfortunately, most of us don’t know enough to distinguish…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I put to the Value Walk site as part of the discussion thread for a post titled Investing Experts Need to Distinguish Opinion from Truth.
That's basic CFA requirement -- analysts must distinguish between facts and opinions in their reports.
Thanks, Paddy. That makes sense.I'll give you an example of a place in which this entirely sensible rule does not seem to me to apply in the investing context.
When academics publish studies in journals,…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I put to the discussion thread for a blog entry here titled It Breaks My Heart When People Don't Comment on My Investing Posts:
you are the one who isn’t educated. It’s like you read a book about the Ocean and think you are the messiah because you learned that water is wet.
We’re not all that far apart re this one, What.
I never went to Investing School and I never managed a big fund. We agree on that much.
All that I have ever…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to the Goon Central board:
it's such a hoot that an old book by Robert Shiller constitutes the totality of academic research on finance on that strange little planet known as HocoWorld.
Shiller's work discredited what came before it.Until something discredits Shiller's work, his model remains the state-of-the-art model.
In 32 years, no one has found anything wrong with Shiller's work.
His work IS something close to…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:
We do agree on this, Anonymous.
Most people don’t care about theory. But the EXPERTS care about theory. The experts root their advice in theory. And most people DO care about what the experts say. So in a practical sense most people today are following the Buy-and-Hold theory. They are not dogmatic about it. And they do not know precisely why they are doing what they are doing. They are…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to this site's blog:
Rob said: “Again, these are merely the sincere views of a non-expert who has spent a lot of time trying to understand conflicts and weaknesses in the conventional understanding of stock investing. ” But Rob, you said you are more of an expert than Jack Bogle, William Bernstein, etc.
Both things are so, Pink.
I never went to Investing School. I never managed a big fund. I am no investing…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:
“We need to punish…”
THERE’S your problem, right there, slick.
I don’t say that you are entirely wrong about this particular point, Anonymous.
The Buy-and-Holders see it as “unfair” that I talk about the 32 years of peer-reviewed academic research that shows how dangerous their “strategy” is. It’s not really me that is punishing them. It is the academic research…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to a blog entry at this site:
"Also, I don’t Jack, Larry, Rick or Scott would consider you a friend.
You’re wrong, Pink.
They don’t want to go to prison. So, yes, they are concerned about my exposure of the 11-year cover-up.
But that is only one part of what these fellows are.
Jack loved the idea of helping millions of middle-class investors when he started out. His amazing accomplishments testify to this reality.…

Set forth below is the text of an answer that I recently posted to a question ("When Will the Stock Market Crash Again?") at the Quora site:
There are two popular schools of thought re market timing. One is that it is impossible to time the market effectively and a waste of effort to try. The other is that knowing when crashes are coming is so valuable that you just have to give the objective of predicting them your best possible shot.
I hold a third view, a view which I believe is…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:
If the intelligent people don’t agree with you, then that means you will only have stupid people agreeing with you.
The intelligent people DO agree with me, Deleted.
I didn’t discover the errors in the Old School safe withdrawal rate studies by myself, Deleted. I suspected on my own that there was something missing in those studies. But I wasn’t able to put my finger on what it was…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to a discussion at this site's blog:
I’ve spoken to hundreds of experts in this field, Deleted. Nearly every one tells me the same basic story.
In private, they say that they LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the idea of being able to tell their clients what they truly believe about stock investing.
In public, they want no part of it. They have seen the millions of acts of intimidation that the Buy-and-Hold Mafia have employed to keep…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:
Would you agree that your inital response in this thread can be reduced to the following dilema:
Either nearly every finance author, lecturer, blogger, advisor, and commenter on the planet is purposely corrupt and involved in a single-minded tight and as-yet completely unbreached unreportred and ongoing conspiracy against the truth that caused a major economic meltdown…
OR…..
a…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to a blog entry at this site:
There are extremely smart people in the investment industry and the ability to invest successfully in order to maximize returns would compel those extremely smart people to follow the money. If you really had discovered something so revolutionary, wouldn't you have a strong vocal following by now?
Yes and no, Questions.
The people who work in this field have high I.Q.s. No dispute there.
But…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:
We see time and again by countless studies that market timing has been a failure.
Please show me the URL of one.
Wade has a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton. He spent a good deal of time trying to find ONE legitimate study showing that long-term timing is not required. He found nothing.
This so shocked him that he did not trust his own finding. He went to the Bogleheads Forum and…

Set forth below is the text of my response to the comment by Marc posted in yesterday's blog entry:
Thanks for that super comment, Marc. I am very much a child of the 60s (I’m 54) and I carry around that “Question Authority” attitude with me everywhere I go. It’s been known to get me into a whole big bunch of trouble from time to time!
But the admonition to “Question Authority” is one of the things about the 60s that I believe really turned out to be right (my personal thought…